Speak, Silence

by Kim Echlin

  This was Mam’s life before my father. Before me. I knew nothing about her.

  She said, I burned Jack’s letters yesterday. But I want someone to know about him. He is buried in Choloy.

  And she looked away.

  Families sometimes tell each other things so shocking that no one knows what to say. So no one says anything. As if the words had not been spoken.

  My father was gone, his loving eyes that were always interested in me, his gentle, sheepish smile. But she was talking about another man.

  She said to the window, not to me, I wonder what life would have been like if I’d got pregnant with him.

  I thought, People break their secrets inside you, whether you can bear to hold the pieces or not.

  I said to Mam, When I go to France I will go to see where Jack Eastmund is buried.

  You’re going to France?

  Yes, Paris.

  She considered this, decided something and said, No need to see where Jack Eastmund is buried. You know where your father is buried.

  She stood, dumped our full teacups in the sink, said, I have weeding to do.

  She could rest. Jack Eastmund was now buried in me.

  When she came back from the garden she went to the kitchen sink and washed her large hands, her cuticles dirt-stained and torn. She had picked three large ripe tomatoes and they shone red on the counter in the afternoon light. She rinsed off the dirt but left the green stems. I love the smell of tomatoes on the vine, earth and sun and taut skins. She looked into my eyes and she said, You should go. I will miss you but you should go.

  I only wanted to get away from her, from her ice pit of sadness, from absence no one but the dead could fill. I could not bring myself to be tender with her and I could not even say, I will miss you too.

  And in this chaotic grief, a startling idea stood naked and waiting: why not be free.

  * * *

  —

  Jack Eastmund had been transferred to Squadron 420, the Snowy Owls, who were part of Operation Gomorrah and the firestorm on Hamburg. He flew the planes that dropped thousands of aluminum foil strips designed to interfere with radar signals and to blind the enemy defences. More planes followed and attacked with a wave of incendiaries and explosives that turned the streets into tunnels of fire. Asphalt melted and trapped the feet of people trying to run away. People wrapped in blankets in buildings turned to ash, like tissues dropped into a campfire. Karla Vogel’s family’s apartment was in Heussweg, above her father’s shop. The fires exploded windows and in minutes gutted whole streets of her neighbourhood. The firestorm sounded like a pipe organ with all the keys pressed at once. Ten thousand tons of bombs dropped in seven hellish summer days. Karla’s mother woke her up in their borrowed farmhouse in the countryside far from the city and said, We got out in time.

  Inside his plane Jack Eastmund felt the heat of a city aflame. He had never felt such a thing in the cool sky. He wanted to think about a girl. He wanted to think about love and the quiet prairie where he grew up. But all he could see was fire.

  * * *

  —

  I found a job in an antiques shop in the Marais cutting prints from old books and hand-colouring and framing them to sell. It was pleasant work that required a steady hand but no thought at all, and when we took breaks the owner brought us fresh baguettes and chocolate. I loved to walk among the synagogues and Asian shops in that quartier, breathing in the earthy tea smell of the plane trees and looking at French books in Les Mots à la Bouche. The antiques shop owner paid me under the table, and as soon as I had enough money I moved out of Shakespeare’s to a chambre de bonne on the sixth floor of an old apartment building on the rue des Écoles. My new room measured a handful of square metres, was unheated, had a single bed, a cold-water sink, a small table and chair. From my tiny balcony I could see the Seine and Notre-Dame and I was happy. Down the unlit hall was a squat toilet shared with the other maids’ rooms on our floor. If I ran up the six floors I could make it to the top before the timed lights went out.

  One night one of my neighbours was standing by my door with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of wine. I had seen him in the hall, always alone. Perhaps he suffered as I did from Parisian coldness toward people like us. He said his name was Rafiq and I told him mine was Gota. I was afraid and told him in my accented French that he could not come in, that I slept only with women, and he laughed and said that he did not believe me and do not worry he would not hurt me and then we both went back into our separate rooms.

  Soon after, I saw him coming and going with a new girlfriend called Lulu and we became friends. Bonjour, Rafiq. Salut, Lulu. They nicknamed me Goat in French, which sounded funny, and they called across the street, Ciao, Chèvre! Sometimes we sat together in the café downstairs and talked about movies and books.

  I had a camping stove to boil water and I drank instant coffee standing on my balcony looking over the city. I enrolled at the Sorbonne, which was very cheap, and with my student card I could go to museums and galleries and eat in cheap student restaurants and sit in libraries. I was especially fond of a small library on the top floor of a building on boulevard Saint-Michel with a window looking toward Versailles. In Paris I often perched in places overlooking the city, a temporary roost in this life I had created out of flight and migration.

  * * *

  —

  Kosmos was in the kitchen at Shakespeare’s with other travellers, pouring damson plum spirits, telling stories and swearing. I liked how his long hair fell across his eyes and the way he spoke English as if it were coming from a grave in his throat. He wore a black jacket over a dark green T-shirt. He was performing, joking about an Olympic skating routine in his hometown of Sarajevo, said that the repeating-like-a-broken-washing-machine-Bolero was inferior to Ravel’s melancholy Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. I left the doorway to sit down at the end of the table facing him. He lifted an empty glass toward me, eyebrows raised, poured me a half tumbler. I took it and drank it all. He lifted his own glass and drank, his eyes not leaving mine.

  In truth, I think Bolero is a finer piece of music, I said.

  Not at all, said Kosmos.

  J’étoilerais le vent qui passe, I said.

  We were showing off because we wanted each other, our bodies two strings on a spike lute. Soon we were walking alone along the Seine. By midnight he was telling me about the play he wanted to write and had I read this famous book, The Bridge on the Drina, in which the main character was a silent bridge? He was wound up and telling me about his theatre group, Mess, and that his play would be about lovers on bridges in his country, where they met and joined their souls or jumped off, everyone trying to be somewhere else no matter where they were born centuries before and would it not be a marvellous play?

  He spoke with the unusual archaisms of someone who has learned English from old books. He said that his grandparents had a farm near the Drina, the home of his deepest memories.

  I knew nothing of the places and things and languages he spoke of, but I liked the timbre of his voice and the light in his eyes. I liked his smell.

  He said, My play will begin with a famous story from Andrić about a bridge built by Rade the Mason. Every night someone was destroying the day’s work. To stop the destruction, Rade ordered his men to find Christian twins, a boy and girl named Stoja and Ostoja, and to wall them into the bridge’s middle pier. His men stole the babies from a distant place, and their wailing mother followed them all the way to the bridge. Rade felt pity so he entombed them alive but left an opening for their mother to nurse them. To this day people collect the thin white stream that mysteriously appears from the stone.

  Kosmos paused to see if I was enjoying his story.

  I said, This is pity?

  * * *

  —

  That first night together sitting by the Seine, Kosmos told me he would take me to see the kapia on his fav
ourite bridge, a stone sofa above rushing water where people came to trade and talk near the coffee-merchant with his charcoal brazier and copper pots and small cups. Kosmos said, Everyone meets on the bridge.

  Then he counted on his fingers until he ran out and started again—Turks, Serbs, Roma, Bosnians, Moslems and Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians and Sephardic Jews, people who speak Ekavian and Turcizmi and Serbo-Croatian and German and Ladino and Arabic and Persian. He dropped his hands and touched my hand for the first time and my blood and breath quickened with this first touch of flesh. He smelled perfect, mountain-grass-sweet skin and salt-ocean sweat.

  I asked, Is Kosmos your last name or first?

  It is my only name, he said. In my left-nut-is-dancing-messed-up country, a person gets killed for a name. I do not tell any other name.

  He put his arm around me, warmth against the quay’s cold stone.

  I said, Soon the sun will rise just above Notre-Dame.

  He asked, Do you think a bridge built by slaves can be the place for a love story?

  Preserve me from the violent…continually are they gathered together for war.

  I said, There must be atonement, apology, purification. Why was your bridge built by slaves?

  Stories ran thick as spawning salmon in Kosmos’s head. Pulling me closer, he told me about the slave Radisav who destroyed the bridge-building work from a simple raft in the darkness every night. When he was caught, he was wrapped in hot, thick metal chains and his toenails were torn from his feet with pincers. The leader Abidaga asked him, What makes you destroy the bridge?

  Radisav said, It is the devil.

  Abidaga asked, What devil?

  Radisav answered, The same devil who makes you enslave us to build it.

  Then intolerable things happened to him. They impaled him through spread legs all the way up under his spine so the wooden rod touched no organs, no heart, no lungs, and did not kill him. He was kept alive gushing blood from the coccyx and the top of the spine and he was hung skewered over the river. The children who usually played by the river watched the torture and absorbed fear through their skin like frogs. All the town was silent but for his screams.

  And when the terror finally ended, the bridge was built with no further resistance.

  Kosmos said, Why do I tell you such terrible stories when I want to kiss you? I come from a place of endless torment and war.

  I thought, Do not fall in love with him.

  I said, I can see your bridge arched over a stage, actors jumping from it and lifting themselves up on pulleys. I can see lovers meeting on the stone couches.

  Then I stood and pulled him up and I said, My home also is a land of many languages—Huron, Algonquin, Iroquois and Montagnais. The Europeans wrote letters back home in French and Italian and Latin. In my home too was war and torture over territory, and the destruction of peoples for land, for ideas, for religion. Why should anyone claim the freedom of another?

  The pulsing blood. I had to step away from him and so I pretended to be an old explorer and I raised my hand over the Seine and said, I claim this place under the authority of the Doctrine of Discovery.

  I intoned to the cathedral, You gargoyles, especially you bored one resting on your elbows, you indigenous-creatures-who-are-not-human, your land is terra nullius and I claim it.

  Kosmos was laughing at me and he understood little of what I was playing at, as I had understood little of his bridges. We are each born of particular violence on this blue and green planet in a dark and lifeless universe, and rather than be here together in awe, we war with each other.

  I was not thinking about any of this that first night with Kosmos. No matter how many violent stories we told each other to pass the dark hours, we were really only thinking about making love together. All that first night until dawn we talked. The truly devastating things had not yet happened.

  The yellow buildings behind Notre-Dame turned golden in the early pale sun, which shone first red and then white in the sky.

  I told him I had a room nearby and Kosmos said he would walk back with me. On the rue des Écoles I unlocked the tall wooden door with my heavy key. I told him to follow me up the stairs quickly because I did not want my old French landlady, whose birds I sometimes took care of, to hear us, and neither did I want to disturb Rafiq and the others on my floor who were sure to be still asleep.

  * * *

  —

  He went out on my tiny balcony and said, You can see the whole city. I pulled from under the bed my small collection of cassette tapes and I put on the Vienna Symphony Orchestra playing Bolero. That first time was in the long dawn and I remember him above me and the sounds outside of the awakening street and our eyes asking, accepting, and I remember how I opened to him and how slow he was. Then we fell asleep and woke and made love again, this time with more hunger and more wild. He slept with his eyebrows raised as if in endless wonder at the world. When I woke again in the early afternoon he was sitting naked over a sheet of paper at my little table.

  What are you writing?

  I am writing you a goodbye letter, but I don’t want to.

  You are in love with someone else.

  He crumpled up the paper, said, Does my face really tell every fucked-up secret?

  I said, Your language sounds terrible in English.

  English is thin, he said. In my language we are creative with our words.

  Tell me about her.

  Don’t ask this, it is fucked up. Do not want to know.

  Tell me.

  He stood, looked out the window. Nothing to tell, he said. She is married. I met her at an art show with her husband in Sarajevo and then I left.

  What is her name?

  I cannot talk about her when I just made love with you.

  I said, At least it is not cowardly like leaving a letter.

  I pulled the sheet up and he unfolded the crumpled letter and refolded it into an airplane and went naked onto the balcony and threw it to glide down into the street. He turned and said, Edina.

  He was right. Her name was now between us like a punch. But he also looked outrageous without clothes outside on my balcony, and his buttocks were muscular and round above strong thighs. Confusing feelings feel normal when you are young. I was laughing at him and I said, Come inside. You are going to get me in trouble going out naked and you will get me kicked out of this room and it is difficult to find a room in Paris.

  I wanted to know him. I wanted to show off for him and I wanted him to watch me. He let me bring him back to my bed and this time we came together, and then he got up and I watched him get dressed. We had so much energy. I knew now he would leave and I said, Va te faire foutre.

  He laughed and said, You see, you swear too and English is not good enough for you either.

  I said, You’re like a bird that flew, see you on the avenue.

  He said, Can I come here again?

  I listened to his steps echo down the six flights of stairs and when I heard them on the tiles of the foyer at the bottom, I went out on the balcony naked and wrapped in the sheet from my bed. He turned to look up at my window and he waved and I could still feel his hands on my back. Already I loved him, and I had to drop the sheet to wave goodbye.

  * * *

  —

  My father kept a real human skull high on our bookshelf. He used it to teach dental students, and my brother and I liked to play cannibals with it. We put it on a piano-stool altar. We were imitating a Looney Tunes cartoon of a toaster salesman who was sentenced to be a husband to the Queen of the Cannibals. My brother and I found this very funny, especially how the salesman jumped into the pot of boiling water so he would not have to get married. One day my father caught us and he came in and gently reached into the middle of our game and took the skull from us and said, That belonged to a living human being.

  He wa
s generally mild with us so when he took the skull that day it marked me. My brother does not remember the incident. What is powerful for one is not even remembered by another.

  * * *

  —

  Kosmos had a motorcycle with a sidecar and every night we rode through the empty Paris streets. We made love. Went out again. Were ravenous. Ate cheap gyros on the street. In the daytime I worked at the print shop and wrote at lunch and he went to the library at Georges Pompidou and worked on his play about bridges. I sent an article about Parisian bookshops to Canadian Forum and the editor wrote back and asked me to send more stories. I was happy. Kosmos earned a little money in the late afternoons washing dishes in an Arab café and sometimes he brought us leftover couscous. We often went to look at the stained glass windows of La Sainte-Chapelle, dark zaffre and gold starred patterns, ruby and indigo. Under those windows when no priest was looking we embraced and he said, We will always be once-in-blue-moons.

  I said, Why? We can be more.

  He said, But I cannot.

  Perhaps you could.

  Hope is irrational but we endlessly hope.

  Later, on my narrow single bed, he pulled me closer and said, Do not fall in love with me.

  Too late.

  Always he kept a little distance. Then blew on the ember. We drove out of town and explored the countryside, ate crêpes in Beaugency, drank coffee in Versailles, went to a medieval street fair with jugglers and spice merchants in Vincennes. He told me he would one day leave. But I did not listen. My love was uninvited fever, reason past care, consuming, and I was helpless in it. I knew I would never have this again and I wanted all of it, tinder and wild fire.